Other requirements#

Beyond having an engineer and group leader who will run the sessions, our requirements before you are accepted on the programme are lightweight:

  • You must tell us specific dates when you expect to run sessions. Otherwise there’s too much risk that we will spend funding sending you a thermal monitor and card game without reaching our funding performance targets. Setting dates is the thing groups find hardest about the whole programme. You should schedule all sessions from the beginning.

  • The group engineer must agree to fill in a brief Royal Academy of Engineering form at the beginning of the programme and again sometime after the end, probably in September 2024. The link for this will be sent by email. It’s not to evaluate whether the engineer is suitable! It’s about their experience of the programme and whether it was good for them.

When the sessions are running, we also have some lightweight requirements so we can prove to our funders that we are meeting our performance targets:

  • The group leader should fill out a very brief session report after each session telling us things like how many people were there and what you need from us.

  • You must give us the full postcodes of the people in the group who are willing to share this information, apart from the engineer who is helping to lead it. You will be reminded to do this in session 1. We throw the postcodes into a big list and send them to the Royal Academy of Engineering. They throw them into an even bigger list and use it to check whether their programmes only reach people who are well-off, a problem for many kinds of programmes that they worry about. No one will use the postcodes for any other purpose.

  • You must ask for a volunteer from your group to participate in a 5-10 minute interview with an independent third party who is evaluating our programme. We remind you to do this during the third session.

  • You must ask any other group members that are willing to fill in a brief survey. Not every group member has to fill it in, but we’re very grateful for the feedback.